Frequently, when traveling or commuting from one place to another, individuals may wish to download an asset such as a movie to their personal mobile device (e.g., smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.). In many instances, the individual may request to download the asset when they only have a limited timeframe during which to download the asset such as when they are waiting to board a train at a train station or waiting to board an airplane at an airport, at which point they may lose connectivity to a router or base station providing the asset once they board. In many instances, there is insufficient time to download the entire asset resulting in the inability of the personal mobile device to playback the asset in its entirety.
The problem is exacerbated for highly popular assets such as a movie recently made available for download. In such instances, many individuals may be requesting and downloading the asset at the same time or at least during overlapping time periods. As a result, due to the greater network bandwidth consumption of servicing multiple requests for the asset, even less of the asset might be downloaded to the individuals' personal mobile devices. In some cases, an asset might not be stored in a local cache of an edge server servicing the personal mobile devices. In such cases, the edge server must retrieve the asset from another location prior to transmitting the asset to the personal mobile devices. As a result, it may take more time for the personal mobile devices to obtain the asset from the edge server. Further, because the individuals are requesting the same asset, numerous redundant portions of the asset are being transmitted over the network to service the multiple requests, which results in unnecessary load and bandwidth consumption. In addition, the individual's cost for using cellular mobile data connections are typically higher than the costs for using other mobile connections (e.g., wireless local area network (WLAN), Bluetooth, etc.). Because the individual's personal mobile device is forced to use the cellular mobile data connection once it loses connection with another network (e.g., WLAN), the individual's costs for obtaining the asset are unnecessarily high.